


The Wrong Side

by hafren



Category: Blake's 7, Discworld - Pratchett
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-28
Updated: 2009-11-28
Packaged: 2017-10-03 21:58:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hafren/pseuds/hafren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vila in Discworld? With a beautiful woman? There has to be a snag, right? Oh wait, she's a werewolf... and a police officer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wrong Side

**Author's Note:**

> Set just after "Shadow"

Vila hated the teleport. It was why he never usually left Liberator if he could help it. That, and an aversion to danger, work and volunteering.

It was that moment just before you faded into nothingness, when you could feel it coming. He never went through it without thinking: _I wonder if I'll ever come back_. He still had a vivid childhood memory of being afraid to drop off to sleep, in case he never woke up. Well, he'd got over that. But the teleport still made his stomach clench.

Still, there were worse alternatives, like the bar-room brawl spilling out into the street he stood in. He couldn't see how they'd got drunk enough for anger; three hours on Svetka Four's famous beer hadn't lifted his mood, but then he could never get drunk when he was depressed. He'd been thinking, reluctantly, of going back, and now it seemed a better idea.

He dodged into a dark archway, which he hadn't noticed when he teleported down. It looked very old; the stone he leaned on was clammy and chill, despite the sun. He spoke into the bracelet, urgently: "Bring me up! Now!"

"All right, all right. Where's the fire?"

"I'm not joking! There's a bloody battle going on down here. Please, Avon, hurry."

"Stop panicking…. All right, I've got the coordinates."

And he felt the nothingness coming, and told himself, as always, it'll be all right; it always is.

***

In the teleport bay of the Liberator a man took shape. Tall, red-haired, with a face that managed to be both engaging and commanding. He looked around, taking in the unfamiliar surroundings, the open-mouthed man at the controls, and slowly nodded as the puzzlement cleared from his eyes.

"Ah, of course. This is some new gadget of the wizards'. Most impressive. It's taken me all the way from the Shades to the university in seconds. I must tell the Commander; this could be very useful to us. Can you take me to the Archchancellor, please?"

The man's mouth closed, then opened again. He seemed incapable of speech. The stranger smiled. "I don't think I know you; are you visiting from Ephebe or Klatch or somewhere like that? You don't look much like my idea of a wizard either, if you'll pardon me saying so; ours always wear the long robes and pointy hats. Now your get-up is more like the Assassins."

The man found his voice and spoke to someone who didn't seem to be anywhere in sight. "Blake, we have a problem with the teleport. Vila didn't come through."

"What do you mean?"

"Exactly what I say. It was Vila who called, and I had his location. But the teleport seems to have sent up the wrong idiot altogether."

***

Blackness began to resolve into light; _there you are, told you it'd be all right…. Hell! It hasn't worked, I'm still… no, I'm not._ He looked around, at a narrow, empty street he had never seen in his life. It was night, with a bright moon, it had been full day on Svetka. He ran to one end of the alley, then the other, as if hoping the archway would suddenly materialise. Nothing was familiar. He hit the bracelet and screamed. "Avon!" It was dead, no contact at all. He looked frantically towards the end of the alley again, and saw he had company. A large, silver-grey wolf.

The blackness came back.

When he regained consciousness, he was lying in the alley, his head resting on something soft. The wolf was nowhere to be seen. From the shadows behind him came a woman's voice. "If you're all right now, I'll have my clothes back, please."

"Eh? What?"

"My clothes. They're under your head. Just pass them back over your shoulder. That's right. And don't turn round."

"There was a wolf…."

"I know. Was there a man too? Tall and red-haired, in uniform. He should have been here."

"There was nobody. Just me and the wolf." He began to shiver uncontrollably.

"You can turn round now."

She was tall, ash-blonde hair spilling from beneath her helmet, dressed all in leather. She looked unafraid, dangerous, capable of fighting off wolves. He began to feel a bit better. It had been kind of her, if a bit extreme, to take all her clothes off just to protect his head from the cobbles… Maybe things were looking up.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Angua. I'm an officer of the Watch."

"The what?"

"The city police. I'm a copper."

"Oh, of course. Naturally. Fate never closes one door, but it shuts another."

It began to rain.

***

In the teleport room, Blake churned his fingers through his hair. "This isn't going to work, is it?"

"No." Avon looked haggard. "However many times we teleport him, he will end up on Svetka, not where he comes from." He hit the controls again, and Carrot appeared in the bay. He'd been down to Svetka Four six times now, generally landing in the middle of another brawl, and the inhabitants of a notoriously lawless planet were getting used to him materialising to sort out their differences. He smiled with genuine pleasure to see the crew members again, especially Cally, who struck him as a really nice, sensible sort of girl, though of course no substitute for Angua.

Blake picked up a printout and began shredding it in his fingers. "You're supposed to be the technological expert; you've got Zen and Orac to help you; have none of you any idea how to sort this?"

"I'm doing my best." Avon turned to Carrot. "Before you came out of your world, did you hear voices? Mine? Someone else's?"

Carrot nodded. "Yes, two voices. One was yours, the other sounded panicky."

"That's the one. My guess is that it works as a triangle; the actual link is between those points on the two worlds somehow and we just got caught up in it. I think there has to be someone at each contact point."

"So what do we do?" Blake asked impatiently.

"Keep the comlink open and wait for Vila to get back to his exact landing point and contact us. If it occurs to him. Then we can send him" – he nodded at Carrot – "down to Svetka and try to bring him up again. With any luck, he'll go home and we'll get Vila back."

"Sounds a bit hit-and-miss."

"Think of something better, then," Avon snapped. Blake looked at him; seemed about to speak for a moment, then walked off. Avon sank his head in his hands.

Carrot put a hand on his shoulder. "I know. My commander gets unreasonable sometimes, when he's worried. That's all it is. But it's hard not to take it to heart, when you admire him so much."

Cally choked back a laugh and hoped Avon didn't have a weapon to hand. When Carrot had gone, possibly to give Blake some advice on motivating the troops, she said, "It'll take Vila a long time to work that out."

"Maybe. But he's cleverer than he makes out."

"Pity we didn't tell him so more often. Have you thought he might not want to come back? Nobody's been particularly nice to him lately."

Avon glanced sharply at her. "Well… all right, Blake was angry with him for going on a binge, but what did he expect?"

"Vila admires Blake. Likes him. It's hard not to take it to heart, as the man said."

***

It is said every climate has niches for different animal types; something vaguely bearlike, something insect-eating, something that seems born to be prey (pre-atomic Earth harboured, though in no individual case for long, a creature called Thompson's Gazelle which was created solely to figure on the menu of all its neighbours). In the same way, every world has a niche for a small, opportunistic, acquisitive mammal with a talent for camouflage and a massive flight distance. Vila and Nobby recognised each other on sight.

"Yerss, things ain't the same without the captain," Nobby sighed. (They certainly weren't; had Carrot been there, Nobby would have been on the beat, not skulking out of work's way in the Watch House swapping stories with Vila.)

"Angua seems very fond of him," Vila said wistfully. "Are they going to get married?"

"Couldn't rightly say. Oh they would, if it wasn't for the… you know, her bein' a…. "

"Yes." Angua had told him she was a werewolf. By then he'd already met her colleagues at the Watch; the dwarf, the trolls, the zombie, so nothing much surprised him any more. He'd asked, "Were you the wolf I saw in the alley?"

"Yes. I felt the change coming on so I slipped round the corner – I don't like to change in front of him." She blushed. "And when I came back, he was gone and you were there. That was me as a wolf."

"I thought it had pretty hair," he'd said.

He had at least been able to reassure her somewhat, having worked out roughly what must have happened. Carrot was either on the Liberator or on Svetka, in which case God help the bar-room brawlers, judging by what everyone said of him. But how they were going to get him back was more than Vila could tell. He knew the Commander had the wizards working on it and half of him hoped for Angua's sake that they would come up with the goods.

The other half wasn't at all sure what it thought. He'd been on patrol with her, in both her guises, helping out, he said, since the Watch was a man short. In her human form she sang Carrot's praise in his ears, and listened in return to his troubles, while he looked at her long silvery fall of hair and wasn't fool enough to try to touch it. As a wolf, though, she would let him stroke her – out of pity, probably, but he was used to taking what he could get. She was more vulnerable in wolf form, more conscious of being different and perhaps disapproved of. And not worthy of Carrot; he knew she felt that.

He was beginning to feel not lust, which he knew how to cope with, but fondness.

***

"You'd like her," Carrot told Cally, "she's very caring and principled, like you. She worries a lot about things – I mean, I'd marry her tomorrow but she's bothered about what the children will turn out like. I wouldn't care a bit, if they were ours – I could go for walks in the park with them and play fetch…."

"Is she pretty?"

"Ever so… she's got really soft, glossy hair and shining eyes." Carrot's own were suspiciously moist; he shook his head and stood up. "No point brooding about it. I think I'll take some more photographs. Have something to show the others when I get back."

"I've never seen a camera like that before," said Cally. "How does it work?"

"There's an imp inside it, drawing the pictures."

Cally managed to control her features, but Avon, glancing up from Orac, snorted derisively. "Yes, and a little man running round inside Zen compiling star charts. A camera works by projecting an image through a lens on to a surface in a lightproof chamber. Then it records it or translates it into electrical impulses. No imps."

Carrot undid the back of the camera. The imp squinted up indignantly from its drawing. "'Ere! 'Ow am I meant to get this done if people keep poking their 'eads in?"

***

It was a quietish night in Ankh-Morpork. Vila and Angua strolled the Shades, dodging the odd customer flying through an inn door to the sound of "And stay out!" Courting couples walked by the Ankh, and sometimes on it; small swamp dragons exploded for no apparent reason and once a man in red robes and a misspelled hat shot past at a speed Vila couldn't have equalled in his worst panic attacks.

He sighed. "I could get to like this place."

"Don't you miss your own?"

"Not a lot," he said bitterly, and then felt a stab of contrition as he saw the anxiety in her eyes. "Oh look, don't worry. Your bloke won't be thinking like that. You're the most important thing to him, same as he is to you. There isn't anyone like that for me."

She put a hand absently on his arm, which tingled. "But you care about them. This Blake; you talk about him the way Carrot does about Vimes."

"Oh, it's hard not to like him… Admire him, even. But he doesn't like me much right now. I went on a bender a while back and he won't let me forget it. In fact that's what I was doing on Svetka; we had some planet leave so I went on another bender to get it out of my mind."

She smiled. "You could apologise."

"I could, but I couldn't change. I'm a weak-willed soak with no backbone and no ambition to put the world right. Heroes can't understand that."

"Vimes would. He used to be an alcoholic – well, still is, I suppose; he just doesn't drink any more."

"Vimes? Bloody hell. What changed him?"

"He did." She stiffened; for a moment he thought she was going to morph. But then he realised she was changing into policewoman mode. "Look," she whispered, "Over there".

He followed her eyes; a man (or whatever, you could never be sure in this place) was climbing the drainpipe of a warehouse towards a closed window. They froze, watching. The man reached the window and worried at it with some tool for a couple of seconds. It opened soundlessly. _Nice one, mate. Very neat job_. The burglar vanished inside.

Angua whispered, "I'm going in at the back. Nab him when he comes out the front." She disappeared and Vila waited, holding his breath. Presently he heard a commotion in the house; the front door opened and the burglar shot out, with Angua behind him. But he had the start of her, and was one of those thin, wiry types who run like whippets. She shouted to Vila, "Do something! Trip him".

Vila watched, frozen, as the man passed within inches of him. _Run, mate, Run. You'll do it._ If Angua had stood any chance of catching up, he might well have tripped her.

***

On the flight deck, Carrot heaved a deep sigh. Gan looked at him in concern. "Are you all right?"

"Oh, yes, thank you, Detr… Gan. It's just so frustrating, not being able to get back. It isn't just Angua – well, it is, mainly, but the Commander will need me, and the Watch, and all the folk I see on my beat, who like to tell me their troubles… I'm sorry for brooding; it's too bad of me, when you've all been so kind. I really like you all, but…"

"It isn't home. I know. I wonder if Vila's feeling the same."

"Oh, sure to be. You must all be so worried about him."

"Yes," Blake said heavily. "Avon, are you sure there's nothing we can do to contact him?"

"However many times you ask, the answer will be the same. We can do nothing unless he gets back to that precise spot."

"I blame myself for this."

"You've got no reason to." That was the blonde one, Jenna; Carrot thought her extraordinarily beautiful and had kept out of her way because he was sure Angua would want him to. She spoke to Blake with a warmth she didn't use to anyone else. "You had every right to be mad at him, and anyway you didn't make the teleport malfunction."

"True," Avon agreed, his face tired and drawn. "But self-flagellation seems to appeal more than logic."

Blake spun round on them both. "I care about him, if you don't."

"Come, now," Carrot intervened, in the voice that could mellow the entire Mended Drum. "That's not fair, sir. You wouldn't say it, if you weren't so worried. But Avon's been up for hours listening to the comlink and Jenna… well, she's worried about you, same as Avon is. Same as I would be if it was the Commander."

Blake fell quiet a moment, then nodded. He said, "Avon, Jenna, I'm sorry. Get some sleep, Avon," and left the flight deck.

Jenna busied herself with the flight controls, her face hidden. Avon studied Carrot a moment, then asked, "Do you generally go about calling people sir?"

Carrot held his gaze. "No. Just the ones I look up to."

***

"Angua, I couldn't. He's a thief, like me. I couldn't help the police catch him. I thought I could be on your side, because… well never mind why, but he belongs on the same side of the law that I do, and somehow I've got on the wrong side. I suppose you'd call it the right one, but it feels all wrong to me. I'm sorry. Can you understand?"

She shook her head. "I don't know."

They walked on in silence. Vila was as miserable as he had ever been in his life, but he knew he would do the same thing again. The sights and smells of the city, which only lately had pleased him, seemed unutterably foreign. He found himself longing for sleek couches and metal surfaces, for fields of stars on the main screen.

Suddenly he stopped. "This is where I was."

"What?" She sounded impatient.

"This street. It's where I materialised. A bit further down. Here. Just here." A great loneliness swept over him; he touched the bracelet, in no real hope that anyone would respond.

"Vila? Are you there?"

"Avon! Avon, it's you!"

"I was aware of that. Now that you are at last where you need to be, we can arrange a swap."

Angua grabbed the bracelet. "Does that mean Carrot's up there?"

"You would be Angua? Yes, he's fine. Here."

Carrot's voice came uncertainly through the link, as if he hadn't figured out how the imps were working it. "Angua? Dear? I'll be there soon. How's the Watch? I hope the Commander isn't trying to do all my work as well as his? Is Corporal Nobbs out on patrol? What about the-"

"Carrot."

"Yes,dear?"

"Shut up."

***

The nothingness resolved into light. Vila opened his eyes, warily, and saw the _Liberator_. He nearly collapsed with relief. Blake strode forward and hugged him. "Glad to see you back."

They were all there; Gan, beaming, Cally with her first-aid kit, dying to play nurses, Jenna, looking happy, though her gaze was on Blake rather than him. Avon, pretending to be busy with the teleport controls, glanced up and gave him a brief smile. He smiled back.

"Come on," Blake was eager to be about the revolution again. "We've spent enough time here. Cally, take him to the medical unit for a check-up. Jenna, Avon, get back to the flight deck and get us moving."

"Yes, s-" Avon bit his lip and followed Jenna.

"Was Angua pretty?" asked Cally.

"Oh, yes. She was lovely. I really fancied her, if you want to know."

Cally looked alarmed. "She loves Carrot, you know."

"I know. I didn't try anything. It would never have worked anyhow. After all, she _was_ a policewoman."


End file.
